Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

California's Self-Generation Incentive Program is about to be re-authorized by Governor Jerry Brown and will continue to provide $83 million per year (through 2019) for behind-the-meter generation technologies including wind, fuel cells and energy storage.

As early as today, California Governor Jerry Brown is anticipated to sign the funding extension.

The SGIP is the original California renewables incentive, predating the California Solar Initiative. It has historically been used for peak load reduction and solar technology adoption.

But lately, the SGIP rebate is going more and more toward energy storage applications. With a mandate to add 200 megawatts of energy storage behind the meter by 2020, the SGIP will "really help build the ecosystem," according to Janice Lin, the chair of Energy Storage North America.

In 2012, the SGIP incentive devoted to energy storage was for just two systems totaling 2 megawatts. In April 2013, there was more than 25 megawatts of energy storage in the SGIP queue. Lin said that there were more applications for energy storage than for any other technology in 2013.

Lin sees the SGIP as integral in meeting the 1.3-gigawatt CPUC mandate for storage, especially since 200 megawatts of that energy storage must be customer-sited. Lin encourages the adoption of a "big-picture" viewpoint on energy storage in California. She envisions the aggregation of distributed generation and storage to provide services such as frequency regulation, resource adequacy or flexible capacity to the grid.

For Lin, energy storage is about "using the grid more efficiently."

"Once the governor signs the bill," said storage expert Lin, it will "be about big implementation efforts at the PUC."